Overreachers

Madeleine had been crying by the window (because she felt like it) and Henry had been continuing to dress while not exactly ignoring her, but not exactly electing to attend to her either. Madeleine had re-arrived at nine to drive him to the airport. It was their old way when he came into town for business. She wore fitted blue corduroys under a frumpy red jumper with a little rounded white collar. She was gotten up, Henry noticed, strangely like an American flag.

In the room now neither of them ventured near the bed. They merely had coffee standing up while they passed over small matters about business, mentioned the fall weather—hazy in the morning, brilliant in the afternoon. Typical for Montreal, Madeleine pointed out. She read the National Post while Henry finished in the bathroom.

It was when he emerged that Henry noticed Madeleine had finally stopped crying and was watching down the twelve storeys to the foggy, gloomy street.

‘I was thinking about all the interesting things you don’t know about Canada,’ Madeleine said. She had put on a pair of clear-rimmed eyeglasses, perhaps to hide that she’d been crying. It made her look studious. Madeleine’s hair was thick and dark-straw coloured and tended to dry unruliness, so that she often just bushed it back with a big clip, which she’d done this morning. Her face was pale, as if she’d slept badly, though her features, which were pleasing and soft with full expressive lips and cheeks and dark, thick eyebrows, seemed almost lost in her hair. Henry went on tying his tie. In the cityscape beyond the window, a big, T-shaped construction derrick with a little green operator’s house part-way along the cross-arm seemed to exit both sides of Madeleine’s head like an arrow. A tiny human figure was visible in the house. ‘All the famous Canadians you’d never guess were Canadians, just for example.’

Madeleine looked around at him condescendingly. ‘Denny Doherty of the Mamas and Papas,’ she said. ‘He’s from Halifax. Donald Sutherland’s from the Maritimes someplace. PEI maybe.’ Madeleine looked different from how she actually was—a quality Henry always found intriguing. Generally, he thought, people looked how they were. The world worked well that way. Madeleine, though, looked like her name implied—slightly old-fashioned, formal, settled, given to measured responses, to being at ease with herself and her assessments of others’ characters. (She was trained as a chartered accountant.)

But in fact she was nothing like that. She was a strong farm girl from near Halifax herself, and liked to drink schnapps, was once a teenage curling champion, liked to stay up late having sex and laughing. He had thought perhaps this strangeness was just a matter of their ages (he was sixteen when she was born) and that people who knew her didn’t find her at all incongruous.

Madeleine looked back out the window at the cars lined along the side of the basilica of the Cathédrale Marie-Reine du Monde. ‘It’s a hazy day to be flying,’ she said. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

It was eleven. The room service tray with silver things and a red rose in a crystal bud vase sat on the dishevelled bed, on top of the scattered pages of the newspaper. Henry liked reading the Canadian papers. They made him think about all those important things that were going wrong in the world that weren’t very important to him.

Henry Rothman was a large bespectacled man, who when he was young had looked—and he had agreed—something like the actor Elliott Gould in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, though he had felt he was more light-hearted than the character Elliott Gould had played— Ted. Rothman was a lawyer and a lobbyist for several firms that did big business in the States and abroad. He was a Jew, like Elliott Gould, and had grown up in Roanoke, had gone to Virginia and then to Virginia Law School. His parents had been small-town doctors and now lived in Boca Raton, where they were happy in a condominium doing nothing. He practised with a firm that included his two brothers, David and Michael, who were litigators. He had been divorced ten years and had a daughter living in Boston teaching school.

Madeleine Granville was an account executive for Rothman’s biggest client, the West-Consolidated Group. Madeleine knew about the cost of things: currency, fertilizer, train transport, containers of soy beans, containers of corn, benefits packages, bonuses, severances. She had gone to McGill and studied economics. She spoke five languages, had lived in Greece, and had wanted to be a painter, until she met a handsome young architect on a train from Athens to Sofia. They had settled in Montreal where he had his practice and where they both liked it. Their story was a story Henry Rothman liked. It seemed young, heady, exciting, but also savvy, solid, smart. Very Canadian. Canada, in so many ways, seemed superior to America. Canada was sane, tolerant, friendly, less litigious, less dangerous, calmer. He had thought of retiring here, possibly to Halifax or Cape Breton, two places he of course had never been. He and Madeleine had even discussed possibly living together by the ocean. It had become one of those magical issues you give your complete attention to for a week, and then later can’t understand why you ever considered. In truth, Rothman loved Washington. He liked his life and his big house behind Capitol Hill, his law-school chums and partners, the city’s slightly antic, slightly tattered southernness, his brothers, his membership at the Cosmos Club. His access. He occasionally even had dinner with his ex-wife, Laura, who like him was a lawyer and had remained unmarried. Who you really were and what you believed, he realized, were represented by what you maintained or were helpless to change. Very few people really knew that; most people continued to try to become something else. But after a while these personal facts simply revealed themselves like maxims, no matter what you said or did to contest them. Henry Rothman understood he was a man fitted primarily to live alone, no matter what kind of enticing sense anything else made.

Madeleine was writing something with her fingertip on the cool window glass while she waited for him to finish dressing. Crying was over now. No one was mad at anyone. She was amusing herself. He could see light through her yellow hair. ‘Men think women won’t ever change; women think men will always change,’ Madeleine said concentratedly, as if she were writing these words on the glass. ‘And, lo and behold, they’re both wrong.’ She tapped the glass with her fingertip, then stuck out her lower lip in a confirming way and widened her eyes and looked around at him. She was a complex girl, Henry Rothman understood, for whom life was just now beginning to seem confining. In a year she would almost certainly be far away from here. This love affair now was only a symptom.

He came to the window in his shirtsleeves and put his arms around her from behind in a way that felt to Henry fatherly. Madeleine let herself be drawn in, turned and put her face nose-first against his stiff shirt, her arm loose about his soft waist. She took her glasses off. She smelled warm and soapy, her pale skin where he touched her neck under her hair, as smooth as glass.

He held her close, pushing with his big fingers into the taut construction of her body. ‘Say,’ he said. She would speak, then he could provide a good answer. The window made the air on the back of his hands cool.

‘Oh, well.’ She paused and took a breath. ‘I was trying to determine how to think about all this now.’ She rubbed the sole of her shoe over the polished top of his black shoe, scuffing it. ‘Some things are always realer than others. I was wondering if this would seem very real at a future date. You know?’

‘You respect the real things more, I think,’ Madeleine said, and swallowed, then exhaled. ‘The phoney things disappear.’ She lightly drummed her fingers on his back. ‘I’d hate it if this just disappeared from memory.’

‘Oh, no,’ Rothman said. ‘I can promise you it won’t.’ Now was the right moment to get them both out of the room. Too many difficult valedictory issues were suddenly careering around. ‘How about some lunch.’

The phone on the bed table began ringing then, loud shrill rings which startled them both, and for some reason made Henry look out the window into the pale autumn haze. Far away on a wooded, urban hillside he could see the last of the foliage—deep oranges and profound greens and dampened browns. In Washington today summer was barely over.

He was startled when the phone rang a third time. It had not rung once since he’d been in the room. No one knew he was here. He stared at the white telephone beside the bed as if he expected it to visibly vibrate.

It rang a fourth time, very loudly, then—as though suddenly— stopped.

Madeleine looked at him and blinked. She did not think it was a wrong number. She believed he knew exactly who it was, and that it was someone inconvenient. Another woman. Whoever was next in line after her.

Though that was not true. There was no one in line. He had no idea who’d called and hoped whoever it was wouldn’t call back. It was time to go.

When the phone suddenly rang again Henry went straight for it and hurried the white receiver to his ear.

‘I’m not nervous. No,’ Henry said. ‘Why don’t you tell me who this is.’ He looked at Madeleine again. She was staring at him disapprovingly, as if he were staging this entire conversation and the line was actually dead.

He looked at Madeleine. The big black derrick’s armature with the little green house attached was still emerging from her head on both sides. The words Saint Hyacinthe were written along the cross-arm. ‘Who was it?’ she said. ‘You look shocked.’ Then suddenly she said. ‘Oh, oh, oh, oh, don’t tell me. It was Jeff, wasn’t it? He knows I’m up here. Oh, shit.’ Madeleine turned and faced the outside and put both her hands to her cheeks as if that would change things significantly.

‘I didn’t admit anything,’ Henry said, and felt immensely irritated. He expected loud pounding to commence immediately from out in the hall, then shouting and kicking, then the outbreak of a terrible fist fight that would wreck the room. All this, moments before he could make it to the airport. He reminded himself he hadn’t admitted anything. ‘I didn’t admit anything,’ he said again and felt foolish.

‘I just have to think,’ Madeleine said. She looked pale and was patting the sides of her face, as if this was a way of achieving calm inside her head. It was theatrical, he thought. ‘I have to be quiet a moment,’ she said again, facing away.

Henry looked around the cramped, little room. The cluttered, unmade bed with the coffee utensils and the silver bud vase, the dresser and the clean mirror, the cloth-covered chair with a blue hydrangea print. Two reproductions of Monet’s Water Lilies on opposite, otherwise featureless white walls. Nothing promising or even unpromising was in this room. Nothing foretold that things would quickly work out perfectly and he would soon be on his flight, or that none of that would happen. This was a venue, a space, nothing more. He could remember when rooms were different. Better. He thought what he often thought at the moments when things went very bad—and this was bad: that he was a man who overreached. He always had. When you were young it was supposed to be a good quality. But when you were forty-nine, it wasn’t.

‘I have to think where he might be,’ Madeleine said. She had turned and was staring at the phone again as if he—her husband— was inside it and threatening to burst out. It was one of those moments when Madeleine was not how she appeared: not the slightly formal, reserved girl in Gibson Girl hair, but a kid in a bind, trying to figure out what to do. It was less intriguing.

The telephone rang again, and Henry immediately answered it.

Madeleine was facing outside again, listening to Rothman’s conversation.

‘Why do you want to know that? You think I’m outside your door calling you on a cellphone?’ Henry heard some metal-sounding clicks and scrapes on the phone line. Possibly Jeff had dropped the receiver because his voice was suddenly distant and unintelligible. ‘Well, open the door and find out,’ the man said, back in touch with things now. ‘You might be right. I’ll come in and kick your ass.’

‘I’d be happy to come talk to you,’ Henry said, then stopped. Why had he said such a thing? There was no need for that. He saw himself in the mirror, a large man in shirtsleeves and a tie and a little bit of belly. He looked away. It embarrassed him to look this way.

‘I have no earthly idea.’ It occurred to Henry that every single thing he was saying was a lie. He had brought into existence a situation in which there was not one shred of truth anywhere. How could that happen?

‘I probably can’t find you there,’ Rothman said. He looked at Madeleine. She was staring at him. In just an instant, he had things rounding back under control. He could tell it in her face—a pale face, with bleak admiration in it.